VieIII / 2020-12-12 08:28:17

What's That About?

The Game of Life is a famous and popular 2D cellular automaton invented by Dr. John Horton Conway, who sadly died of COVID-19 on April 11th, 2020. In the 90s, my very first, real Amiga program was a Game of Life called Vie (life in French), which I had improved until releasing VieIII on Aminet on July 18th, 1996 .

There are actually many, many, implementations of Conway's Game of Life and other such cellular automata. Shorty after Conway's death, Desire released a version of the Game of Life for MS-DOS in... 32 bytes! (Yes, bytes... no Kb or Mb... See on YouTube). On Amiga, besides VieIII, there is only the amazing VisualEasel, allows implementing and running any (?) kind of cellular automata by defining your own rules and creating your own worlds.

Conway's Game of Life was the starting point of many wonderful research on cellular automata. Many Web sites, conferences, and books are dedicated to cellular automata and new patterns are now being found using computers! Amanda Ghassaei wrote a fascinating Blog post on complex machines built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life, leading to a kind a Recursive Universe .

 

VieIII

Originally compiled with SAS/C, I was recently porting it to VBCC, which is a more modern compiler that works well with the great Cubic IDE . The porting was not too difficult but made me realised that my code, at the time!, was very coupled... maybe because SAS/C allowed including C files, which I mindlessly abused at the time .

Now, I separated better the different C files, added some headers to expose and share few variables and many functions, and it compiles and runs again! I uploaded the new version in Aminet, including a new pattern in memoriam of Dr. Conway from XKCD...

 

Downloads

You can download the latest version of VieIII here or current/previous versions:

  • 20/12/12, v0.19: This is the first stable version of VieIII, recompiled with VBCC v0.9g and tested while Enforcer, SegTracker, etc. were running... no more hits! Also, it can load most (all?) the patterns provided in the archive without troubles and it will warn if a pattern is bigger than the current resolution of the board.